Captain Matthew Webb(1848–1883)

Matthew Webb was born at Dawley in the iron-and-coal country of east Shropshire on the nineteenth of January 1848, second of the twelve children of Matthew Webb, a Dawley general practitioner, and Sarah Webb. He was schooled at home and at the Coalbrookdale High School, took to the water early (he saved his younger brother Charles from drowning in the Severn at twelve), and on his thirteenth birthday in January 1861 was apprenticed as a midshipman to Captain John Reeves of the merchant ship Conway out of Liverpool. He served the four-year apprenticeship to 1865, took the second-mate's examination at the Mercantile Marine Office in Liverpool, and across the next nine years served as second mate, then first mate, then captain in the British merchant marine across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades.

He was awarded the Royal Humane Society's Stanhope Medal in April 1873 for diving overboard from the Cunard liner Russia in mid-Atlantic to attempt the rescue of a fellow seaman who had fallen overboard (Webb swam in heavy seas for thirty-five minutes; the seaman was lost; Webb was awarded the medal on the testimony of the bridge officers). The Stanhope Medal incident gave him a small public profile in the British press of the early 1870s and the conviction that his real future lay in long-distance professional open-water swimming rather than the merchant marine. He left the merchant marine in 1874 in his twenty-sixth year and committed himself to the project of the first authenticated English Channel swim.

He attempted the Channel swim from Dover on the twelfth of August 1875 and was forced to abandon the attempt six hours and forty-eight minutes in by heavy weather. He attempted it again from Dover on the twenty-fourth of August 1875, entering the water from the Admiralty Pier at 12:56 pm in his merchant-marine swim-trunks, smeared from head to foot with porpoise oil for cold-protection, accompanied by three rowed pilot-boats. He swam the breast-stroke (the only competitive long-distance stroke of the period; the crawl-stroke had not yet been developed for distance swimming) across the Channel through the afternoon, the evening, the night, the dawn and the morning of the twenty-fifth, was carried by the tide approximately twenty-two miles east of the direct fifteen-mile Dover-to-Calais crossing line, and walked ashore at the Cap Gris-Nez beach near Calais at 10:41 am on the morning of the twenty-fifth of August 1875, twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes after entering the water. The total swim distance, including the tidal displacement, was approximately thirty-nine miles.

The Channel swim was the most-celebrated single English sporting achievement of the 1870s. He was paid two thousand pounds for the publication rights to the post-swim memoir The Art of Swimming (1876), conducted a long sequence of exhibition swims and lectures across England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States through 1876 to 1882, and through that exhibition career built a substantial personal income (the highest single earnings of any professional sportsman of his era except for the great racehorses' owners). He died at the Niagara Falls on the twenty-fourth of July 1883 in his thirty-fifth year attempting an exhibition swim of the Whirlpool Rapids below the falls; the swim was the most dangerous open-water challenge then known, and Webb committed to it for an exhibition fee of ten thousand dollars. He was buried at the Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls. The English Channel swim has been authenticated by the Channel Swimming Association in over two thousand four hundred subsequent successful crossings since Webb's; the official record of the modern hours-and-minutes Dover-to-Calais time stands as a permanent benchmark in the open-water swimming world. The Webb name in modern English sporting history carries the weight of the August 1875 swim.